Likelihood to Recommend

Acquia

Acquia is well-suited for any Drupal web platform. I think it best plays in the enterprise space, either for B2B or nonprofit/higher ed/government. Acquia is a great solution for smaller web platforms, as well, but the price is typically prohibitive in these scenarios.

Likelihood to Renew

Acquia

Acquia 10.0

Based on 8 answers

As a Drupal Web Developer, I have not encountered or been exposed to any other hosting solution that could surpass the benefits of having a site hosted on Acquia Cloud. Although, for any side-project or low-cost freelance gigs, I cannot expect that I'll always have the option of recommending Acquia Cloud, and that's okay. While I am at work and trying to help our team gain more exposure to my companies' extensive list of clients, when we have the fortune of adding another Drupal-based client to our roster, getting those clients on Acquia Cloud makes every other aspect of building or modifying their school website that much easier

AtomicWriter

Alternatives Considered

Acquia

I have used Pantheon for almost as long as I have used Acquia. Many colleges and universities will use sub-sites in Drupal either as a separator for each department, or possibly for targeted marketing campaigns. One of the biggest reason we tend to use Acquia over Pantheon for these clients is that Pantheon does not support Drupal sub-sites. So, there is an added cost to the client each time they want to spin up another site based on their base Drupal installation. The admin UI for Pantheon is similar to Acquia's, but they take a more hands-on / hands-off approach when it comes to core Drupal upgrades. Pantheon uses their own software called Terminus to help interface between the developer and the server. By them managing the Drupal core files, you, as a developer just need to understand that you can not update your copy of the site locally, when an updated version of Drupal is released. All of your custom and contributed modules are your responsibility (as they should be), but you just need to be aware that your commits will be rejected if they contain core Drupal updates.

AtomicWriter

Return on Investment

Acquia

Rapid prototyping and feature development is simpler with Drupal and the Acquia platform is simple to extend for experimental sites.

By leveraging the enterprise hosting platform, we could focus on the feature development during the initial build out of the site, deferring the hosting complexities to a time when we would have more bandwidth.